Three Doors (Part 1 of 2)

Three Doors

Ashton Macaulay

            Neil listened to the crackling whisper of the autumn breeze as it mixed with the rumble of passing cars. The sun hung lower in the sky each day and while the leaves weren’t quite red, it was easy to see that Fall was fast approaching. He sipped his coffee, warm heaven in a paper cup, and watched the day flow by. Ordinarily, he found it difficult to stop and enjoy the moment, but on that afternoon, there was one speck of perfect and it surrounded him.

            He walked to the crosswalk, three blocks from home. Even the prospect of his empty apartment seemed golden in the fading daylight. There was something about the edge of a season that held so much promise and potential. The walk sign turned white, and he stepped into the street.

            Wind whipped at him, frigid, winter personified. The daylight disappeared, replaced by instant, omnipresent fluorescent. Neil was no longer standing. Instead, he sat in an uncomfortable chair against a grey wall. His hand remained stretched in front of him, curled in a gripping gesture, but the coffee was long gone. In front of him was a small television screen on a rolling platform. Behind it were three doors.

            Each door was identical visually, dark brown wood, perfectly smooth, gold knob on the right side. The frames were also made of wood but painted grey to match the walls. However, calling the doors identical didn’t feel right. Through waves of confusion, Neil felt differences in each. If asked to explain why, he wouldn’t be able to; They were simply unalike on an atomic level. For instance, the door on the left was clearly somewhere no one ever wanted to be. The door in the middle was neutral, almost like there might have been a brick wall behind it, or perhaps it wasn’t even a door at all. The door on the right was warm, and welcoming, a hot bath on a cool winter’s evening.

            Neil’s consciousness did somersaults as it tried to reckon with the facts before him. This was not Parkview; he was no longer on his afternoon stroll. A twinge deep in the folds of his now-aching brain told him he wasn’t anyplace. He felt a lingering sense of familiarity and unease. While uncomfortable and mundane, the chair felt like his childhood home, a place he hadn’t visited in over a decade.

             “Hello, Neil.” The voice came from everywhere and nowhere.

            Neil looked around the room, attempting to find the source. A single black intercom box stuck out from the wall on the right; far too small to have produced the voice—also he was sure the box hadn’t been there a moment earlier.

            “Hello,” said Neil, surprised his voice was still there. He couldn’t say why he was surprised, but he was. “Where am I?”

            The intercom clicked on and paused. “You’re in a place.”

            Neil twitched in annoyance. “That’s not helpful.”

            “I know, I’m sorry about that. We’re doing some processing here, and it won’t do to tell you more until we’ve got the basics figured out. Do you know where you are?”

            “Why would I ask where I am if I knew?”

            “I don’t know. You all do funny things like that. It’s on my list of questions anyway. Have to ask them or the paperwork comes in mountains.” The voice was the equivalent of a sarcastic sigh mixed with the thunderous roar of a storm cloud, netting out in an imperceptible state between the two.

            “How did I get here?”

            “Still processing that bit. You’ll see that there’s a television in front of you. Studies show that watching helps pass the time.”

“I don’t want to pass the time, I want you to tell me why I’m here.”

“Yes, sir, I know, but the studies are very clear on this.”

“What studies?”

“THE studies. Now, there’s a remote on the sofa next to you.”

“Sofa, what s—” Neil looked down and found that he was indeed sitting on a sofa. It was light blue and plush but faded at the edges. Loose threads hung off the armrest where an animal had been scratching. On the cushion next to him was a black remote. “Hey, wait a minute, I recognize this.” Neil picked at the fibers of the sofa, feeling the rough texture. It was his first couch, the one he had bought when he moved out of his college apartment and left for the big city. For the first few months, it had been the only piece of furniture he had.

            “Well, you should recognize it, it’s your couch.”

            “How did you get my couch?”

            “By processing,” said the voice, clearly annoyed. “I did tell you that’s what I was doing. Looks like you had a cat.”

            “I did, Turbo.” Neil loved that cat. From the moment he brought it back from the rescue, the fat little bastard had been glued to his leg. It was exactly the kind of friendship he needed to get through several lonely months of job hunting in an unfriendly city on the verge of collapse.

            “Right, I’m seeing that. One second.”

            A fat, black cat wandered around the edge of the sofa, belly swinging between its back legs. It looked up at Neil with instant recognition in its yellow eyes and let out a happy meow.

            Neil shot up. “Woah, what the f—”

            “No cursing, please. It’s for your benefit, trust me.”

            “But that’s—”

            “Your dead cat, Turbo, yes.”

            Neil looked down at the cat, a mix of fear and realization dawning. “Am I dead?”

            “Yes.”

            Neil waited for the sudden weight to hit him. It didn’t. Instead, he felt a spreading numbness in his chest where a heart might have pounded only recently.

            “Would you like to have a seat?”

            Neil looked at the couch and then back to Turbo who wrapped himself around his leg, purring. “Sure.” He sat down.

            “Alright, good. You’re on your way to acceptance, congratulations.” There was no congratulatory sentiment to accompany the statement.

            “Thanks?”

            “There’s a remote on the couch next to you.”

            “Yeah, you mentioned that.” Neil picked it up and Turbo hopped on the couch to take its place.

            “We’ve prepared some clips from your life for you to watch if you’d like. If you’d rather not, you can sit and wait while we process.”

            “Process what?”

            “You keep asking that. Your life.”
            “What’s with the doors?”

            “I think you know what’s with the doors, Neil.”

            Neil looked past the television. He did know what was with the doors, he just couldn’t put it into words. The wood grain and finality were embedded in his brain as if they had always been there. “I don’t like the door on the left.”

            “No one likes the door on the left.”

            “So, I just sit here and watch TV?”

            “That’s a little reductive. It is YOUR memories, not just run-of-the-mill reruns. Comparing a bespoke collection of your most important memories to a cable package is rude.”

            “Sorry.”

            “Not your fault. Being dead is… challenging… I’m told”

            Neil pushed the power button and the old television set flickered to life. Turbo moved into his lap and curled into a tight ball. “How did I die?”

            “Does it matter?” asked the voice.

            Neil supposed it didn’t. He could hardly remember anything before the grey room. Something about walking and something in his hands? It all felt far away. The remote had four buttons on it. Power, play, pause, and skip. Neil clicked play.

            The TV flipped over to a clear image of carpeted floors and a dark wood-paneled closet. Neil—well a much younger Neil—lay on the floor of the laundry room in his childhood house. A series of blankets and pillows were pushed into the corner where his bed once stood. Gone were the friendly carpets, replaced by tile and two large washing machines. The television radiated terror, existential, and brand new.

            “Why am I seeing this?” asked Neil.

            “Don’t know,” answered the voice. “Seems like it was scary.”

            Neil stared into the screen and found it felt less like a memory and more like it was happening in real-time. His chest tightened and he fought the urge to keep his eyes closed. “I don’t think I want to watch this.”

            “That’s why they put in a skip button.”

            Neil ran his numb fingers over the button and pressed skip. There was a chime as a light above the middle door briefly illuminated. Then the television fast-forwarded through his life at incredible speed. He saw birthdays, seasons, and trauma pass by in the blink of an eye. Despite the impossible rate of the tape, he found that he could still see every individual memory. They were flickers, like skips on old film, but he felt them like a roiling wave passing back and forth through his body. The highs were high, the lows were low, and he was stuck somewhere in the middle, firmly in neutral territory.

            A white light appeared above the right door, accompanied by a light chime.

            Neil found that he liked the noise. “What was that?”

            “Processing. No more questions, this isn’t easy work.”

            “Are you rating my life?”

            The disembodied voice sighed. “Reductive, again.”

            The right and middle doors chimed repeatedly while the left door remained dark.

            The TV stopped its mad dash through his life and landed on a sunny afternoon on a grassy hill in the park. He was sitting halfway off a picnic blanket, arm around Jane Millen, his childhood crush. They dated on and off for years, the results often leading to one of them crying in a locked bedroom. It was the cataclysmic kind of fiery relationship that only high schoolers could truly maintain.

            Turbo shifted off of Neil’s lap and curled up in the crook between his side and the cushions. Despite the numbness he felt everywhere else, Turbo’s body was warm.     He stroked the cat absentmindedly, watching the summer day pass by on the television. The smell of fresh-cut grass was strong, as was Jane’s perfume. He felt a bubble of hope. At that moment, they were happy together. There were plenty of times they weren’t, but in that moment, they were.

            Then, unbidden, the television fast-forwarded, and a low gong sounded. A red light appeared above the left door. Neil didn’t like the sound. It was the sound of a thousand terrible monsters marching through the night with a single objective.

            The television stopped. This time, Neil was in a parked car, windows steamed up blocking the outside world. He was half naked and so was Becka Harding, decidedly not his girlfriend at the time. The chill of the December evening made warmer by body heat radiated from the TV screen, so much so that Neil felt the hairs on his arm stand up and his skin prickle. “Hey, I don’t think I want you watching this.”

            “Don’t be crass, Neil, I’m not watching your life. I have work to do.”

            The red light above the left door remained illuminated. Neil watched as adolescent fervor turned into a mistake that would haunt him with shame for the better part of his adult life. Only years of therapy and late nights spent staring at the ceiling would cure him of the notion that high school mistakes were damning for eternity. Neil hit the skip button. The red light turned off and the television returned to running at its olympic pace through his life.

            “Is this why people say their life flashes before their eyes when they die?” asked Neil.

            “No.”

            “Really?”

            “How should I know? I’ve never been to the Land of the Living. Please, let me do my job.”

            The lights on the doors illuminated in rapid succession, ping-ponging between the left right, and middle doors until they were more like a strobe. Despite the speed, Neil felt every illumination in his core, showing him something he had always known, but with a singular finality that said it was true above all things. So many memories passed on the screen and Neil wanted to stay with each of them, even the bad, but somewhere deep down, he knew he couldn’t. The tape would continue to speed up, and then there would be no more.

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Story too long, so I split it in two. Part 2 here.